A Piaget Primer


Book Description

Offers a fascinating and understandable account of childhood development for anyone—education and psychology students, day care center workers and nursery school teachers, and parents. Jean Piaget is arguably the most important figure of the twentieth century in the field of child psychology. Over more than six decades of studying and working with children, he brilliantly and insightfully charted the stages of a child's intellectual maturation from the first years to adulthood, and in doing so pioneered a new mode of understanding the changing ways in which a child comes to grasp the world. The purpose of A Piaget Primer is to make Piaget's vital work readily accessible to teachers, therapists, students, and of course, parents. Two noted American psychologists distill Piaget's complex findings into wonderfully clear formulations without sacrificing either subtlety or significance. To accomplish this, they employ not only lucid language but such fascinating illuminations of a child's world and vision as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as media manifestations like Barney and Sesame Street. This completely revised edition of this classic work is as enjoyable as it is invaluable—an essential guide to comprehending and communicating with children better than we ever have before.




Piaget & Education Primer


Book Description

Piaget & Education provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to the work of Jean Piaget. This valuable classroom work roots Piaget's work in its historical context, and then provides dozens of classroom-based examples of how that work helps teachers understand the lives of children. It is an excellent resource for practicing teachers and student teachers, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, curriculum, and philosophy of education.




The Bronfenbrenner Primer


Book Description

This is the first ever introduction to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Framework written specifically for undergraduate students. The author provides a carefully structured, guided introduction to Bronfenbrenner’s concepts, their interpretation, and their potential applications. Bronfenbrenner’s scientific analysis of the role the environment plays in human development earned him a premier place alongside Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson as a contributor to our understanding of developmental processes. His ideas are essential for analysing how development happens, how it goes astray, how to right it when it does, and how to create environments that will promote healthy development. The Bronfenbrenner Primer walks students through each component of the framework in a logical order, helping students build a solid, systematic understanding. It describes the background and context that led Bronfenbrenner to develop his framework, illustrates a wide array of potential applications, and provides activities students can do to practice applying the framework to their own experience. Honed over 25 years of teaching Bronfenbrenner’s ideas, this text will be essential reading for students across the behavioral and social sciences.




Piaget's Theory of Intellectual Development


Book Description

Interprets Piaget's theories and provides a concise introduction to Piaget's basic ideas and findings concerning children's intellectual development.




Piaget's Conception of Evolution


Book Description

The first full-length study of Jean Piaget as a philosopher and evolutionist. Messerly traces Piaget's earliest conjectures about knowledge through its further developments to its mature formulation as 'genetic epistemology.' Messerly analyzes Piaget's constructivist theory of the evolution of human knowledge as continuous with, yet partially transcending, the biological process of adaptation to the environment. Messerly's study serves as an invitation to further explorations with Paiget's theory and will interest philosophers, biologists, and psychologists.




The Moral Judgment Of The Child


Book Description

First Published in 1999. Readers will find in this book no direct analysis of child morality as it is practised in home and school life or in children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments. With this aim in view, a large number of children from the Geneva and Neuchatel schools were questioned and held conversations with them, similar to those we had had before on their conception of the world and of causality. The present volume contains the results of these conversations.




The Piaget Primer


Book Description

'Do children have anything to teach teachers? Jean Piaget believes that they do. As a beginning teacher, I focused on elaborate preparation of explanations and demonstrations on content. To piaget and his co-workers I owe a special debt for their ingeneous methods of exploring children's thinking and their theory of intellectual development. A study of Piaget's work, together with direct observations of children, has been instrumental in my transition to another stage of development as a teacher.' -Ed Labinowicz




Theories of Childhood


Book Description

A supplemental text for an Issues in Early Childhood Education or Introduction to Early Childhood Education course in Early Childhood Education departments or in Child and Family Studies departments. Covers five leading theorists whose perspectives are studied and applied widely in early childhood education. The book distills each theorist's work and explains how it relates to early care and education. Brief, inexpensive; a perfect complement to foundational courses.




Origins of Intelligence


Book Description

A look at the origins of cognitive abilities in primate species. Since Darwin’s time, comparative psychologists have searched for a good way to compare cognition in humans and nonhuman primates. In Origins of Intelligence, Sue Parker and Michael McKinney offer such a framework and make a strong case for using human development theory (both Piagetian and neo-Piagetian) to study the evolution of intelligence across primate species. Their approach is comprehensive, covering a broad range of social, symbolic, physical, and logical domains, which fall under the all-encompassing and much-debated term intelligence. A widely held theory among developmental psychologists and social and biological anthropologists is that cognitive evolution in humans has occurred through juvenilization—the gradual accentuation and lengthening of childhood in the evolutionary process. In this work, however, Parker and McKinney argue instead that new stages were added at the end of cognitive development in our hominid ancestors, coining the term adultification by terminal extension to explain this process. Drawing evidence from scores of studies on monkeys, great apes, and human children, this book provides unique insights into ontogenetic constraints that have interacted with selective forces to shape the evolution of cognitive development in our lineage. “The authors’ elegant theory and comprehensive empirical synthesis of how the development of human intelligence and brain evolved opens up cascading heuristic avenues for creatively answering one of the great questions in the human history of ideas.” —Jonas Langer, Human Development “A handy source of information on comparative cognitive abilities related to life history and brain variables.” —James Anderson, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute